In Gayalbanka, a nondescript village in Odisha’s Cuttack district, something remarkable has happened. For the past one week, ( BusinessLine visited the village in the third week of July) three homes here have been smoke-free. In other words, women in these homes are cooking onstoves with an LPG connection.

One of the houses belongs to Ranju Sutara, who lives with her husband and the families of his two brothers. At the kitchen, her youngest sister-in-law is cooking a potato dish on the newly acquired stove. Outside, the portable earthen stove has been kept aside and a little away lies a bundle of firewood, perhaps a reminder of the past.

“Earlier my husband would have to walk up to 5 km to collect firewood from the forest. If not, we had to spend ₹100 to buy the wood from the market,” says Sutara. Also  “now it takes half the time to cook,” says her sister-in-law Anjali Sutara with a smile.

One street away, Uddhav Rana has just finished lunch his wife Suma cooked on the new stove. The LPG connection has brought relief for the farm labourer. “Every third day, I would spend five hours going to the forest to collect wood,” he says. 

Outside, his neighbour wonders why he hasn’t got his connection yet. A boy comes running with a filled form, and asks, “Can I get an LPG?”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his colleague Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister for State (Independent charge) for Petroleum and Natural Gas, would be glad to hear the impact the government’s Pradhan Manitri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) is having on the lives of the women in Gayalbanka. The village is part of the Baranga block in Cuttack district where the scheme was launched on July 12. About 17,000 women in the block have been identified for the programme.

Despite the heartening start, the early days reveal challenges.The biggest is that of middlemen. Just before the launch of the scheme, middlemen in Kalahandi district had collected ₹3,000 from many customers promising LPG connections at discounted rates. It was only when they went to the distributor for a refill that they realised that they have a fake registration number.

Equally challenging would be to build the infrastructure to support the scheme. While the lone LPG distributor in Baranga came up just two years ago, there are many districts in Odisha that have fewer than five distributors. The state wants to double the present 40 lakh LPG connections in the next three years, out of which 14 lakhs will be distributed under the PMUY. In many regions, the LPG penetration is in single digits.

The onus is on the oil marketing companies, including Indian Oil Corporation and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, which are now taking steps to increase their manpower on the ground. 

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